Brandon Sargeant, the current EASB Premier Junior Tour champion, ran out the winner of the first Challenge Tour event beating former pro Luke Simmonds in the final to earn himself £2000. More importantly, Sargeant will be looking to build on this success in his quest for a main tour place.
2 June 2018It beggars belief that there ends up with only 59 entrants for what is seen by many to be the biggest amateur event for some time. The reasons for amateurs seem to be many and various, including claims from some that they would have played if they could have entered.
There has been calls for a secondary tour for so long now, and this seems like the start of it at least. Since the Challenge Tour was announced and details have been drip fed to us, there appeared to be a lot of support from the players. There’s £2000 guaranteed for the winner, and it’s not dependant on entries like many amateur comps.
During Q School, many were looking at the Order of Merit and hoping that they could earn a place on the tour and there were emails out to them all telling them to enter and if they didn’t make it, they would get a refund. They also knew that if any of the top 64 didn’t enter then they would be going down the rankings to get 64. So what went wrong?
The timing of it has come under criticism. But guaranteed if it hadn’t happened as it did there would have been cries for it to have done so. Some could well have been tired from all that snooker. Really?! Some might have had work commitments which is understandable. But overall I think it very poor that they couldn’t get 64.
Bit of a rant I know but there has been a lot of work behind the scenes to get this tour off the ground.
Challenge Tour 2 is in Preston in a few weeks time so let’s see how far down the Order of Merit they will have to go in an attempt to get to 64
